How do I render existing forms as HTML5?

[niseyleemacon]

I have installed mobile forms.

I am able to preview  as HTML in designer.

The IVs works for me.

But the documentation is so sparse and sketchy, that I honestly do not know what I am supposed to do to display the 300 forms that we have in a web browser.

Our forms are read only and generated on the fly using a watchfolder.

This is made especially urgent because we can no longer display our pdfs in Chrome.

Any assistance appreciated.

[deepak_k_]

Though not sure about your exact use case, one way could be that you dump generated XDP in a particular location on server using some predefined conventions and use that folder path as content root and file name as template in url.

More details @ http://helpx.adobe.com/livecycle/help/mobile-forms/rendering-form-template.html

-Deepak

[niseyleemacon]

Thank you Deepak, I have already read that article, and do not have a clue what they are talking about. I currently render forms from a watchfolder. The application generates an xml file, workbench has an xdp template for each form, the two are merged in the watchfolder, and a form is sent to teh browser.

In workbench I have created a process for each one of my forms.

So - moving forward - what do I do to make the same thing happen?

What is a Profile Renderer?

Where do I use a dataref or data parameter?

Where can I find a document that details end to end how this works?

If i use te SetAttribute, where is that - in Workbench?

What is CRDX lite?

Sorry if I sound frustrated, thought teh solution was clear, but am discovering that it may not be.

Thanks!

[deepak_k_]

>. What is a Profile Renderer?

Profile is a JCR node which can have some configurations most importantly sling:resourceType property pointing to folder containing Profile Renderer in CRX repository. Profile renderer is jsp which does actual call to OSGi service and generate html with help of other jsps/sling scripts. More details @ http://helpx.adobe.com/livecycle/help/mobile-forms/creating-profile.html

>Where do I use a dataref or data parameter?

Data can be used for inline data e.g. in http post call your data can be one of the request parameter containing XML as value string, while dataRef can be used if your data is saved on file system or http like dataRef=file://C:/temp/data.xml

Where can I find a document that details end to end how this works?

http://helpx.adobe.com/livecycle/help/mobile-forms/mobile-forms-architecture.html

>If i use te SetAttribute, where is that - in Workbench?

In your custom profile renderer jsp.

For details about CRX DE, take a look at:

https://dev.day.com/docs/en/crx/current/developing/development_tools/developing_with_crxde.html

-Deepak

[niseyleemacon]

My application is a .Net app currently. i am honestly not sure that any of this has been helpful for my team and myself. I've read the articles, looked at the links. I am not sure what I'm supposed to do with any of this. Do I need to write code to display the forms as HTML5? Are you saying it's not configured out of the box? I am totally confused. Was totally hoping that ES 4 would be better and have better documentation than previous versions.

Hopefully you have helped others out with your answers. Thanks!

[deepak_k_]

Ok,

>>I currently render forms from a watchfolder. The application generates an xml file, workbench has an xdp template for each form, the two are merged in the watchfolder, and a form is sent to teh browser.

>>In workbench I have created a process for each one of my forms.

I assume above is the current implementation of your PDF form right?

When you say After merge, form is sent to browser, how is it done?

Typically I would have implemented this in following way (very rough sketching and may need fine tuning).

Watch folder has XML, process would save that XML in a temp location. It would generate the url in format:

And then the path returned above from the process can be used in web browser to open form.

Or may be I’ve not understood your use case yet.

-Deepak

[niseyleemacon]

My code builds the xml and places it in the input folder of the process and then retrieves it from the result folder for display.

So I use the xdp file name (which is same name as the process) to find the path to the result folder ,I suppose that that is a url also.

Then can I assume that you are saying that I should build the path to the html5 file in the same way?

Thanks!

[deepak_k_]

Yes, html form path should be along the same line.

In the article I shared about rendering the form, or while using formsIVS, you can look at the url generated. You can construct a similar url based on where you put the xml file and XDP file on server machine.

-Deepak

[adeivasigamani]

niseyleemacon

In LC ES4, what happens for HTML 5 rendering is, any XDP form that is in the content repository of the server is supplied as an input to the Rendering profile, The rendering profile is a AEM adobe experiance manager component, that converts the XML structure of the XDP (XFA form) and replaces xfa tags with HTML 5 tags and regenerates each of the XFA form objects as a equivalent HTML object.

In your use case, you say that you have your results in the result folder in the server where you save the result of your merger process. In order to view your results as HTML,

please generate an url as follows

http://[server-name]:[port-number]/lc/content/xfaforms/profiles/default.html?contentRoot=[your parth to the xdp in result folder that you want to render]&template=[file name of the xdp that you wish to render]

please fill the [] with the values that you have with you.

example in my case would be

http://localhost:9083/lc/content/nedbank/profiles/default.html?contentRoot=repository:///Application...

my xdp form in the above case is in the Application path Applications/MobileStartPoint/1.0/XDPHTML5/Form, the form/template name that i wanted to be rendered as HTML is XDPTOHTML.xdp.

Note - Do not expect that HTML 5 form that is rendered to support all the interactive features that was supported in PDF, the reasons are HTML conversion does not bind well the drop down values in the data node of the xfa to the drop down field its binded to so the drop downs in your HTML 5 rendered form does not work, like wise there are a lot of other related issues with the HTML 5 rendering